Read about our family's transformative, year-long travel journey during the height of the global COVID pandemic.

In July 2020, we collectively decided to reject the status quo and created the space to completely re-imagine our lives. We sold our home in Virginia along with most of our belongings and hit the road in "Thelma," a 20-year-old bus, in search of more joy, peace, health and well-being. Over the next 12 months, we traveled over 32,000 km (20,000 miles), visited 26 U.S. states, 11 National Parks, five countries, spent three months living on a beach in Mexico and four months living on "Hanavave," a sailboat in French Polynesia. We finished our journey with an intrepid, 7,000-kilometer (4,350-mile) crossing of the South Pacific Ocean from Bora Bora to our new home in Brisbane, Australia.

We emerged with more clarity and joy than we could ever have anticipated.

As recent history’s biggest disruptor to life as we know it, the global pandemic has made many people question where they live, how they work, and other important lifestyle choices. Chronic disease rates are at an all-time high, depression, anxiety and mental fatigue are endemic, people feel increasingly despondent about the state of the world, and climate change is devastating crucial ecosystems across the planet at record rates. Our teenagers are suffering more than ever but since our society has turned parenting into a competitive sport, most parents don’t discuss their parenting struggles for fear of negative judgment. It has become clear that our way of life is not only unhealthy, but also unsustainable.

The space our family created by exiting the mainstream for an extended period of time allowed us to gain clarity and reframe our beliefs around everything from how we live, how we parent, how we learn, how much we’re affected by unreasonable societal expectations around achievement and status, and more.

The purpose of this book is to inspire parents, busy professionals, young people, and anyone seeking more from their lives, to re-evaluate how they live and how they view their place in the world in order to create more healthy, fulfilled, and happy lives. ...